Archives for October 2019

Henry Veatch: Realism and Nominalism. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1954.

Henry Veatch: Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1980 [1962].

 

David Hume disrupted philosophy by arguing that ‘is’ implies no demonstrable ‘ought.’ The mere fact that a thing is by nature or by convention does not tell me whether it is good. Natural laws may describe gravity, the growth of a tree, the traits of horses and humans, but they cannot tell me what I should do or become. Nature tells me what pleasures and pains me, not what is right. Similarly, no civil custom or law justifies itself; political society may reward me or punish me, but it cannot prove that it is right to do so. When writing about matters of good and bad, right and wrong, Hume could offer nothing other than experience as the criterion to which I should attend, claiming there is no other. When considering politics, he interested himself primarily in ruling institutions, which shape the experience of citizens and subjects, and history, which recounts the experiences of previous generations for the instruction of subsequent generations.

Evidently, Hume must understand nature to be devoid of purpose. Like Hobbes, he recognizes material, formal, and efficient causes in nature, but not final causes. To put it in historical terms, he shares Hobbes’s rejection of Aristotelian philosophy. That is the fundamental reason for his denial of any connection between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Nature, what is, can generate no such thing as an ‘ought.’ Those who claim otherwise therefore fall into both logical contradiction and groundless ethics.

Henry Veatch has his eye on that claim, both as a logician and as a moral philosopher. But he begins well before Hume, considering the major philosophic controversy of the generation before Thomas Aquinas: ‘realism’ vs. ‘nominalism.’ He does so for no antiquarian reason. “Realism and nominalism may well be perennial issues in philosophy” (RNR 1); “today, no less than in the 12th century, there is a realist-nominalist controversy raging” (RNR 2). And this makes sense, inasmuch as the philosophic atmosphere, as it were, of that century resembles that of the mid-1950s: In the twelfth century, philosophers “knew little else in philosophy save logic”; for their part, today’s philosophers are “all pretty much agreed that the only really serious discipline in philosophy is logic” (RNR 2). Then as now, philosophers bind themselves with “logicism” (RNR 2).

Veatch contends that “the current issue of realism vs. nominalism may be in large measure understood in terms of, and perhaps may even be said to have been caused by the rather uncritical use by modern logicians of a certain basic scheme, or ordering pattern, that quite literally dominates the entire vast corpus of modern mathematical logic” (RNR 3). This pattern begins with Gottlob Frege’s understanding of logic in the mathematical terms of function and argument. In any mathematical equation, there is a constant and a variable—for example, in ‘2x’ two is the constant, x the variable. Frege “proposed to generalize these notions so as to make them applicable far beyond the confines of mathematics in the narrower sense, extending them to the analysis of concepts and propositions in logic” (RNR 5). He translates these terms into logic by calling the logical equivalent of the constant the “function,” the x-factor the “argument.” To analyze the sentence, “Caesar conquered Gaul,” he treats “Gaul” as the function or constant, Caesar as the argument or x-factor.

This sets up “the vast and elaborate quantification theory of modern logic, a theory, which it is claimed, almost infinitely surpasses the old subject-predicate theory of traditional logic in range and power” (RNR 8). In subject-predicate theory, “Caesar conquered Gaul” means just that. It registers “a simple one-place function.” But in quantification theory, anything could replace the function, “Gaul,” just as any number could replace the two in “2x.” “The propositions envisaged in quantification theory will involve besides one-place functions, two-place, three-place, four place and so on up to n-place functions!” (RNR 8-9).

Bertrand Russell, for one, became so enamored of quantitative logic that he dismissed subject-predicate logic altogether, holding it “unable to admit the reality of relations” (RNR 10) Why so? Because subject-predicate logic limits itself to only one thing in relation to one other thing; it is cramped by concreteness. Quantitative logic, like numbers, ‘abstracts from’ the particulars: “The true function of logic as applied to matters of experience,” Russell writes, is to “show the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives,” to “liberate the imagination as to what the world may be” (RNR 11). As Veatch puts it, in Russell’s view quantitative logic “provides an inventory of possibilities, a repertory of abstractly tenable hypotheses” (RNR 11). Veatch may be a bit too much of the gentleman to remark that this sort of thing fit rather well with Russell’s socialism, an imaginary construct of what the world may be, abstractly considered. With quantitative logic in hand, a philosopher might do seriously what Plato’s Socrates did ironically: make a city in speech plausible.

In considering realism and nominalism in his thirteenth century, Aquinas distinguished ens rationis and ens naturae, while connecting this distinction to a distinction in logic. Reason, he argued, finds what he calls “intentions” in natural things “insofar as they are considered by reason” (RNR 12). By “intention” he means such attributes as genus and species. One doesn’t find such ideas as genus and species by means of one’s senses’ perception of things; the ideas “rather are consequent upon reason’s consideration of the things of nature” (12). Logic, thought guided by the principle of non-contradiction, does discover the genus and species of things by comparing one thing to another, observing that (for example) a diamond is not a ruby, a sheep is not a goat, because their attributes in some respect contradict one another, whereas a diamond and a ruby are both minerals, a sheep and a goat both animals, because their attributes in some respects are identical to one another, do not contradict at all. Veatch observes, “if the subject matter of logic is the sort of thing which St. Thomas here suggests that it is, then it is quite obviously not the sort of thing that Lord Russell says it is” (RNR 12). They are things of different species. “Liberating the imagination, or drawing up inventories of possibilities, or contemplating unsuspected alternatives as to what in the eyes of God or the devil or Lord Russell the world may be—all this is all very well, but it simply isn’t the business of logic,” since what Russell wants logic to “disclose and reveal are real possibilities; they are not mere intentions in the sense of beings of reason” (RNR 13).

Thomas’s distinction between the natural things and logical “intentions” addresses the realism-vs.-nominalism question he inherited from his immediate philosophic predecessors by connecting reality to names in a logical, and indeed Aristotelian way. Logical intentions have nothing to do with things in the natural world, real or possible, as immediately perceived by the senses. “It is only as things come to be known, or better, it is only insofar as in coming to be known they acquire a status as objects of thought or reason… which otherwise and just in themselves they would not have at all” (RNR 14). If the “subject” we consider is hydrogen, and by measuring it we determine its atomic weight as 1.008, “we make ‘hydrogen’ the subject of a proposition and we predicate ‘having an atomic weight of 1.008’ of it” (RNR 14). Reason “may be said to find in hydrogen, insofar as hydrogen comes to be known and is made an object before the mind,” its atomic weight, the predicate of the sentence ‘Hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1.008’ (RNR 15).

Moreover, “logical intentions, in addition to being consequent upon reason’s consideration of nature, are also instrumental to reason’s consideration of things” (RNR 15). That is, they are “the tools and means of human knowledge,” not only their products; “or better, they are produced in the process of knowledge, precisely in order that through them such knowledge may be made possible” (RNR 16). In nature, “hydrogen is neither a species nor a subject, but in its condition of being known and as an object before the mind, it takes on these purely logical features or ‘intentions,’ as they are called” (RNR 16). The mind classifies hydrogen with respect to it being “a species of a genus or a subject of a predicate” so that “we may thereby come to know that hydrogen really is an element or that it does in fact have an atomic weight of 1.008” (RNR 116-17). “The main instruments of traditional logic—concepts, propositions, and arguments—are, in form and structure, simply relations of identity” (RNR 17). As “tools,” they ‘dig out’ the characteristics of natural objects not perceived by the senses alone, characteristics nonetheless real, albeit real in a different way than sensually-perceived reality. “It is only intellectually or in the mind that what-a-thing-is is abstracted from the thing itself and then reidentified with it in a logical proposition,” such as ‘a sheep is a mammal'” (RNR 17). Through the tool, instrument, device of logic, the mind relates “a thing to its own ‘what,'” causing the thinker “to recognize what that thing is in fact and in reality” (RNR 18). “The relation of identity that the mind sets up between subject and predicate in a proposition is an intentional relation precisely in the sense that through it the mind or reason is able to intend things as they are in themselves and in reality”; when I say what a thing is I am ‘identifying’ it through language (RNR 19). That’s why I might be mistaken and, if my proposition is illogical, why I must be mistaken; I can’t show you how a thing can be or do opposites at the same time, with respect to the same part, in relation to the same thing. A subatomic particle may manifest itself as a wave or as a particle, but not at the same time, by means of the same observation.

Not so with Frege’s quantitative logic. It isn’t “intentional” in the Thomistic sense, for two reasons. First, “the relation of a function to its argument or arguments is not a relation of identity”; therefore, “the function can in no sense be regarded as representing what the argument or arguments are’ (RNR 19). ‘2x’ tells me nothing about what ‘2’ is. The person who speaks or writes ‘2x’ has formed no such (Thomistic) intention. As Veatch puts it, the sentence “Milwaukee is north of Chicago,” in which “Chicago” and “Milwaukee” are the arguments and “north of” is the function, tells me nothing of “what Milwaukee and Chicago conjointly are” (RNR 19-20). Second, “unlike the relation of identity between subject and predicate, the relation between argument and function is not one whose nature is simply to be of or about something else” (RNR 20). The relation of Milwaukee to Chicago in the sentence refers not to the ‘whatness’ of either city, but to “the order of parts in a whole.” It does not tell me what that whole is—if, for example, Milwaukee and Chicago form part of a ‘metroplex.’

Returning to the question of realism and nominalism as they reappear in modern philosophic thought, Veatch observes that for Russell the word or symbol that is the “argument” in the proposition (say, Milwaukee, Chicago, Socrates) stands for an irreducible “particular”; the function sign (say, north of, or Plato) stands for a universal or a relation. In the sentence “Socrates was older than Plato,” “Socrates” and “Plato” are the particulars, the “arguments,” and “being older than” is the relation or universal (RNR 23-24). What does such a sentence, so understood, signify? It means nothing about ‘what’ the particulars are, but rather states (one aspect of) their relation to one another. Veatch calls this “logical atomism,” meaning that both the particulars and the universal/relational exist “outside of and along side” of one another (RNR 27). Russell himself soon saw that this means a word in a logical proposition, and therefore the logical proposition itself, need not have any relation to reality at all. A word of course “contributes to the meaning of the sentence in which it occurs,” Russell writes, but that is a feature of language, not necessarily of any reality beyond language (RNR 31).

Russell thus went from the quasi-Platonic realism of Frege, in which numbers “peopled the timeless realm of Being,” toward nominalism. W. V. Quine takes that final step, denying that there are any abstract entities at all. The word “appendicitis” “is a noun,” he writes, “only because of a regrettable strain of realism which pervades our own particular language” (RNR 35-36). As Veatch puts it, Quine regards “all supposedly ‘descriptive’ words as if they are ultimately and in principle no different from ‘logical’ words” (RNR 36). “This certainly sounds like nominalism”; “the function-argument scheme has indeed given rise to an extreme nominalist type of semantics” (RNR 37). Quine can deny that the ‘function’ side of the proposition, the ‘universal’ side, refers to any objective reality, arguing that “in any proposition involving a function-argument structure, while both parts of the proposition may be presumed to be meaningful and significant, still in asserting the proposition as a whole, what one asserts to exist are only the arguments and not the function” (RNR 40). One cannot, by means of logical propositions, understand anything that is ‘out there.

Thus “modern logicians and semanticists have found themselves forced into one or the other of two very embarrassing alternatives” (RNR 45): either Quine is right, and logic is only a language game which tells one nothing about any reality beyond itself, or one must admit that ‘Milwaukee’ means a particular city, ‘Socrates’ a particular person, ‘north of’ a real direction, ‘older than’ seniority in years—an alternative that re-presents quantitative logic as a realism depending upon a leap of faith (which doesn’t sound entirely logical).

But (Veatch argues) this only indicates that philosophers have entangled themselves in a pseudo-problem. “The entire trouble would seem to stem from the use in modern logic of a schema like that of function and argument, which turns out to be radically non-intentional, and hence not adapted to the proper purposes of logic at all” (RNR 46). Subject-predicate logic avoids this problem altogether because to use logic as a tool, instrument, device “certainly does not imply that one means or signifies by it a real universal entity existing extra-mentally, as the realists would seem to hold; nor is the only alternative to this the nominalistic one of supposing that in using a universal concept, one does not thereby mean or signify anything real at all” (RNR 47). If I assert that “many Wisconsin barns are red” I don’t mean that many Wisconsin barns are redness. I’m not saying that any particular barn or set of barns is the idea of redness, or indeed that it is the idea of barn-ness. Nor does such an assertion commit me to the idea of the Ideas in the supposedly Platonic sense of an ‘extra-mental’ set of realities above and beyond the particulars. In using language to form sentences I intend to bring out, some aspect of the particulars I am talking about; using language logically signifies an intention to correct errors in my perception of those particulars, to re-cognize them. As Thomas puts it in the Summa contra Gentiles, “although it is necessary for the truth of a cognition that the cognition answer to the thing known, still it is not necessary that the mode of the thing known be the same as the mode of its cognition” (RNR 51). In this, Thomas follows Aristotle, that logician who does not need ‘Platonic’ ideas in order to reason about things.

“Somehow,” Veatch concludes (with a hint of exasperation) “one wonders whether, if only this simple and rather obvious principle of intentionality had been observed by modern logicians, there would ever have been the current and seemingly futile dispute between realists and nominalists among modern semanticists” (RNR 51). But what about modern ethicists? To use a recently-invented, Greek-sounding word Veatch avoids, has this ‘epistemological’ debacle twisted them in the wrong direction, too?

Can Ethics Be Logical?

Lord Russell famously answered with a resounding ‘No,’ having taken the ways of mathematical logic for those of logic as such and concluded that in ethics all we have are emotions (as in the fear behind his Cold-War slogan “Better Red than dead”) and that in politics all we have is imagination powered by emotion (as in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism). In Rational Man, Veatch demurs, deploying Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to refute not so much Russell as the existentialist ethics of William Barrett in his then-recent book, Irrational Man and also the language-philosophy stance of Charles L. Stevenson, who, in his 1944 book Ethics and Language, consigned substantive ethical questions to the realm of less-than-philosophic souls. Veatch intends not to explicate Aristotle but “to use him in a modern effort to set forth and justify a rational system of ethics,” an application of Aristotelian ethics to modern circumstances (RM xiii). “This book will have to do with just such normative questions as the currently regnant intelligentsia has come to regard as not philosophically respectable” (RM xxvi).

Unlike Aristotle, whose ethical philosophy leads directly to political philosophy (a term he may have invented), Veatch promises to duck social and political questions, as in current circumstances so many ‘realists’ skip ethics entirely, jumping immediately to matters of society and politics, conceived simply as field of ‘power relations.’ Such Realpolitik thinkers, ‘Left’ or ‘Right,’ find unintended allies among linguistic philosophers. But what if philosophy has more to offer than language games, however rigorously played? “To most people it must seem that ethics has to do with more than just the meanings of words and the uses of language” (RM 2). What if they are right? Even if to think well about ethics one will need to clarify terms, among other acts of hygiene?

Everyone wants to live well. And, after any number of blunders, most people see that living well requires “an art or technique that one must master, a skill that one must acquire before one can do [the act of living] well, or perhaps even do it at all” (RM 3). In an effort to help in this, optimistic parents send their children to college. But, “Let’s face it: modern learning does not have anything to do with living, or being learned with being human” (RM 4). In considering the lives of philosophers, Kierkegaard “trembles to think of what it means to be a man” (RM 5); Socrates replies that to philosophize one must know oneself and learn how to live. One must find a good way of life—a thought Socrates shares with the founders of major religions, such as the God of the Bible, who very much insists on His way, demanding that His people abjure the ways of Canaanites, Egyptians, Persians, and indeed all others but His own.

In adjuring men to master Fortuna, to conquer nature, modern philosophy, the science it has produced, and the technology that science has produced offer “a truly amazing example of the relevance of knowledge to life” (RM 10). When modern science attends to human nature, it goes so far as to claim to control the lives of non-scientists, reducing human life to a set of “functions” (RM 10)—exactly what one would expect of a project animated by quantitative logic. But who is doing the animation? What is their character? “What is needed for ethics is knowledge not of how to control nature, but of how to control oneself” (RM 10), not only others. In this sense, ethics must precede politics, self-government preceding political rule. What can quantitative logic teach about self-government?

Not much. “Isn’t it a truism nowadays that morals and ethics are relative matters, that is to say, matters of opinion, not of knowledge?” (RM 13) “Ethical relativism has become almost a sine qua non of the educated man, a sort of badge of the modern intellectual,” who maintains that one’s opinions are always ‘relative’ to, even determined by, one civilization, culture class, physical environment, biology, psychological drives. As proof, the intellectual points to the diversity, the contradictory multitude, of moral principles. But this is no proof of anything but the manifoldness of human ways, a fact as well known to Moses and Aristotle as it is to Lord Russell and Professor Stevenson. “The mere diversity in human moral standards does not in principle preclude the possibility of at least some of these standards being correct and others incorrect” (RM 14). Indeed, “the whole world might be wrong and a single individual right” (RM 15), as any number of philosophers (and not only prophets) have started out by thinking.

Ethical relativism follows from Hume’s is-ought dichotomy. The denial of this dichotomy leads relativists “to label their opponents ‘absolutists'” (RM 19n.). Linguistically considered, ‘absolute’ does oppose ‘relative.’ No one calls the knowledge of modern scientists “a purely relative matter”; yet no one calls it “an absolute knowledge,” either. “And if scientists can enjoy an immunity from the dilemma of relativism or absolutism, why may not moral philosophers as well?” (RM 19n)

Some ethical relativists hope that relativism will bring forth greater toleration of differing opinions, and of those who hold them. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict believed so. But, then, so did Benito Mussolini, whose ghost-writer (probably the philosophy professor Giovanni Gentile) wrote for him, “Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable” (RM 20). Toleration, meet intolerance, each of you standing on the same leg (as do so many of the ‘post-modern’ Leftists whom Veatch, Benedict, Mussolini, and Gentile never lived to see).

All of these would-be relativists face the same dilemma, as well as one another. “No human being can stop with just having convictions, he also has to live and to act. But to act is to choose and to choose is to manifest some sort of preference for one course of action over another. However, to manifest any such human preference means that, consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly, one has made a judgment of value as to which course of action is the better or the wiser or the more suitable or preferable.” (RM 22)  Benedict holds on high the banner of toleration; Mussolini self-assertion; “liberated youth” their “impulses and inclinations”; skeptics (Hume) “the standards of the community of which [he] is a member” (RM 23). All of these standards rest on “a glaring non sequitar: “Since no course of action is really better or superior to any other, I conclude that the better course of action for me to follow would be thus and so'” (RM 23). Obviously, there is “no possible way in which the denial of all standards of better and worse can itself be transformed into a kind of standard of better or worse” (RM 23). To get out of this impasse, one will need not self-assertion, whether spirited or dispirited, but self-examination.

“Back to Socrates and Aristotle,” then (RM 27). Back, as it happens, to the facts, and to a consideration of facts prior to asserting the ethical equivalent of realism-vs.-nominalism, namely facts-vs.-values. Aristotle observes that every art and every investigation aims at some good (else why undertake it?). Is there a supreme good at which all our actions, taken together, aim? Since all beings have a nature, a set of characteristics defining what they are, the good for each kind of being must be the perfection of its nature. This means that ‘values,’ as they are called, “are simply facts of nature” (RM 29). It can’t be good for water, as water, to evaporate, although sometimes its evaporation may be good for other beings, or for nature as a whole. The distinctively human good, the one fulfilling the definition of what a human being is, “will involve what might loosely be called the maturity or healthy condition of the whole man, or of man in his total being” (RM 29). Further, “since man is a being capable of intelligence and understanding, and consequently of planned and deliberate behavior on the basis of such understanding, it may also be presumed that the way in which a human being attains his appropriate good or natural perfection will be rather different from that of a plant or an animal,” by “a conscious recognition of what the human end is and by deliberately aiming at this proper end” (RM 29). Such recognition, according to Aristotle’s subject-predicate logic, comes from using the “tool” of logic, by reasoning.

Veatch illustrates this by a hypothetical which seems as if it were inspired by the late Franklin Roosevelt. Suppose that a person comes along who begins by “remind[ing] us of how precarious our existence is,” and then offers us a deal: From now on, he will see to it that we will enjoy “freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from worry,” on condition that “we shan’t know what is going on” (RM 32). In short, life under the soft despotism of administrative statism, ideally conceived. Would we take the deal? We might, “in moods of defeatism, of misery, and of utter hopelessness,” such as many experienced during the Great Depression and the Second World War. But in less dire circumstances “by and large no man in his senses would prefer the existence of a contented cow, however well fed and well cared for, to the existence of a human being with at least some understanding of what is going on” (RM 33). And as a matter of fact, modern rulers usually do not make their offer explicit, shrewdly assuring that the ruled are clever, informed, wise—the very opposite of those deplorable ignoramuses over there—”while in fact depriving them of the reality of all genuine knowledge and understanding,” or at least trying to (RM 33).

Some, following Hegel, will say that human beings don’t want to know so much as they want to be ‘recognized,’ esteemed by their fellows. In running for Congress, the young Abraham Lincoln admitted that such was his ambition. But was that what Lincoln really wanted? “Why do we seek recognition so avidly?” “Because such praise and respect from our fellows somehow serve as reassurance to ourselves that maybe we have accomplished something or amounted to something after all” (RM 35). If so, then recognition or reputation, honor, is only a proximate end; we seek a sense of “our own worth, our own real achievement and perfection” (RM 35). Following Aristotle, Veatch conducts his readers toward self-examination, toward self-knowledge, by his very argument for self-knowledge as a constituent of human perfection. To perfect something or someone, one first must know what it or he is.

What the English would call a ‘horrible’ lurks here. “It would appear that the good life for man, as Socrates and Aristotle envisage it, would turn out to be none other than the academic life, the life of the professor!”—”the pathetic reality of present-day academic life” (and mind you, Veatch is writing in 1962, years before the inmates took over the academic asylums) (RM 36). Perish the thought, preferably by refusing to allow thought to perish, even in academic groves. “Socrates is always careful to stress that the kind of knowledge and wisdom in which human perfection consists is the knowledge of ‘Know thyself’ and the wisdom that makes for the improvement of the soul,” whereas “there is something about nearly all modern science and scholarship that seems to make it not merely impertinent, but actually antithetic to anything on the order of Socratic wisdom” (RM 37). As Veatch’s readers have already seen, the misapprehension of the distinctively human characteristic, reason, and particularly of its tool, logic, has helped to make this so.

Here Veatch ventures a rare departure from Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle proposes two kinds of human perfection or excellence: “the practical life of man as possessing reason” that aims at discovering and at walking along the right way of life; and then, in Book X, the theoretical life, the life of the philosopher (RM 38). But although discovering the right way of life does require (finally if not initially) theoretical reasoning about what a human being is, such knowledge aims at living the right life, not merely thinking about it. “Knowledge for its own sake can never be the be-all and the end-all of human existence, nor can the chief good of man ever consist in the mere possession or even the exercise of knowledge”; it must rather consist “in its use in the practical living of our lives under the guidance of such knowledge and understanding as we possess” (RM 40-41). That is human perfection or excellence, full humanity. “The intelligent man, in this sense, is the good man or the man of character, and, vice-versa, the good man, in the sense of the man who has attained his full perfection or natural end as a human being, is the intelligent man,” who has achieved eudaimonia or happiness understood not as a ‘feeling’ but as a condition (RM 41). Happiness is “not a matter of subjective feeling on the part of the individual, but something objectively determinable,” just as the health of an individual isn’t a matter of feeling healthy (RM 42). If one feels contented by some condition that is “anything less than what as a human being he is capable of and what… he is naturally ordered and oriented toward, then we should certainly say that such a person had settled for less than he should have, or that he didn’t know what was good for him” (RM 43). We would say, as Socrates says of some interlocutors, he has a wrongly-ordered soul.

A modern scientist might reply to Veatch by saying that disease is no less natural than health, that nature has no end or purpose, that life and death are indifferent to nature, equally part of nature. Veatch answers, as he does to logical positivists, that modern science excludes consideration of natural end a priori. The ‘method’ of modern science, dovetailing with the method of mathematical logic, excludes considerations of ‘what-ness’ and ‘who-ness.’ But such considerations are exactly what ethical thought requires. This does not make ethical thought irrational; it only makes it unscientific. I once asked an atheist, who found the notion of God unscientific and therefore rationally inadmissible, if his little daughter knew him. If so, she could not know him scientifically, having no knowledge whatever of his chemical composition, his DNA, or nearly anything other things modern scientists can measure beyond his size, shape, and (to some extent) behavior. “The possibility of explanation in scientific terms must involve the exclusion a priori of all such data as do not lend themselves to the particular procedures of scientific testing and verification” (RM 46), as the possibility of explanation in mathematical terms must involve such exclusion of all things do not lend themselves to the particular procedures of mathematical measurement and proof. But these exclusions do not preclude reasoning in other ways, ways which (as Aristotle says) fit the things being considered.

One might reply to Veatch by remarking that all of this depends upon the nature of nature, as it were. What or who are you knowing? Is it or he (or He?) good to know? Veatch, with Aristotle, answers that human being not only has a good but is itself good ‘for itself.’ God might reply, ‘Not so fast, sinner.’ But God will then offer the grace which makes nature better than it now is. And even a mere philosopher might justify his own way of life, in reasonable terms, by explaining that he too requires self-knowledge, and in knowing himself he knows that, qua philosopher, qua lover of theoretical and not only practical wisdom, his perfection consists in attempting to know the whole of nature, including its First Cause. The philosopher’s good is not exactly the same as the good of the practical man. It comprehends, or at least seek to comprehend, more than a good life in the social and political world. The scientific and mathematical ‘universes’ are not necessarily “the only reality there is” (RM 47). But does this leave “in the utterly unsatisfactory situation philosophically of having to acknowledge that truth is not one, but many”? (RM 48).

Whether by natural reasoning or divine revelation, knowledge of the human good requires that human beings think ‘pre-scientifically,’ pre-mathematically. In the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Everything I know of the world, even through science, I know from a point of view which is mine or through an experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless” (RM 48). “We must first re-awaken this experience of the world,” Merleau-Ponty continues, “for science is its second expression. Science does not have and never will have the same kind of being that the perceived world has, for the simple reason that science is a determination or explanation of the world” (RM 48). This latter claim could (and did, in Merleau-Ponty’s case) lead not to Aristotelianism but to a historicist apology for tyranny, to a claim that morality consists in going with the ever-changing, Heraclitean flow issuing in a universal despotism. With Aristotle, Veatch rather doubts that, and would concur instead with Leo Strauss (who equally called for a return to ‘naive’ or pre-scientific understanding as the foundation of all knowing, including scientific and mathematical knowing) in recognizing that historicism is only another ‘ism,’ philosophically interesting but mistaken, and sometimes calamitously so. Accordingly, Veatch valorizes not Stalinism or Maoism but the less grandiose task of “try[ing] to return, in some sense at least, to the things themselves,” to “a return to this world as it is before scientific knowledge,” to “the concrete world of ordinary human experience” (RM 48-49).

What happens if we do? “Living intelligently involves seeing things as they are and seeing oneself as one is, amid all the confusions and misrepresentations due to one’s own passions and predilections and prejudices” (RM 56). In so living, one finds the passions to be double-edged—often clouding the mind but also providing a useful mental shorthand, as the pain of a bee sting causes wariness of bees, around which one exercises caution ‘without thinking,’ from then on. “Without emotions and passions, a human being would not be human, but a mere clod, lacking the dynamic quality that is requisite for the attainment of human perfection” (RM 59); if passions run too high, they overpower thought altogether. “The virtuous man is the man who knows how to utilize and control his own emotions and desires,” the one who governs himself (RM 59). Fundamentally expressions of desire or aversion, emotions imply judgments of good and bad; this is why Aristotle puts such emphasis on the definition of virtues as means between extremes, and on the particular virtue of moderation. To understand courage (for example) as the mean or the middle between rashness and cowardice implies that the courageous soul leaves itself room for making a reasoned judgment of how to conduct itself in each circumstance which arises. Moderation, which ‘hits the middle’ regarding physical desires, is the virtue needed most often, addressing the ordinary challenges of our daily lives. Virtue understood and exercised as “the mean” also enables us to avoid judging simply according to habit derived from “mere social convention” (RM 61). It enables even a non-philosophic soul to ‘ascend from the Cave’ of social opinion. And it should not go unnoticed that “the mean” isn’t quantifiable; there is no mathematical formula we can devise to get us to hit it, except with respect to bodily goods, care for which requires us first to intend to hit the mean in the first place.

Aristotle identifies magnanimity or greatness of soul as the crown of the moral virtues. Veatch ‘democratizes’ it somewhat, calling it “self-respect” (RM 62). “The man who manages to live well will be the man who has a just estimate of himself, being neither overly complacent about his capacities and achievements, not, at the other extreme, overly lacking in a sense of his own dignity and responsibilities” (RM 62). Veatch criticizes the tendency of many Americans toward “indifference or even… disgust for the purposes and responsibilities of life,” men who preen themselves on such evasion (RM 62). In academia, this attitude results in “your man of learning secretly delight[ing] in picturing himself as a sort of composite Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, and perhaps Pablo Picasso,” while in reality is “only a Sir Walter Elliot” (RM 66), that model of vanity readers meet on the first page of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Ethics consists in the art of living well, but it is more than an art. Aristotle warns that in the arts an intended mistake is not so bad as an unintended one, but in ethics, which involves practical wisdom as well as art, an unintended mistake is worse. That is because in ethics you need more than know-how; “in addition, you have to do” what you know (RM 71). If you know what to do but fail to do it you “would certainly not be a good man” (RM 72), unless unfavorable circumstances prevented a good course of action. What is more, “there just can’t be any knowledge of this sort of thing without doing” (RM 72), developing a desire to do the right thing, cultivating good “habits of choice” (73), having “learned how to let his choices and preferences be determined by such knowledge and understanding as he may have, rather than to proceed simply from chance feelings and impulses of the moment or from long established but mechanical habits of response” (RM 74).

Is the “examined life” possible? Is it the good life for human beings, or are human purposes irretrievably irrational? Yes, it is possible and good because the good life is “the natural end toward which a human being is oriented by virtue of being human,” a “fact of nature” discoverable by reasoning although not created by reasoning (RM 79). That human nature requires deliberation and choice for its fulfillment becomes obvious in considering the many examples of persons lacking in self-knowledge, unable “intellectually to see or know the truth about [themselves], as in not being willing or disposed to see this truth” (RM 83). Such persons may be no less, and even more, intelligent than we are, but what a mess they have made of their lives. This underscores Aristotle’s remark that “in a science such as ethics the end is not knowledge but action” (RM 84). Choosing to do what’s right is harder than knowing what’s right; deliberate habituation in right action—”the repeated performance of just and temperate actions”—is more moral than moralizing. Generally speaking, “in the final analysis our human failures are ultimately due not to the fact that we don’t know what we ought to do, but rather to the fact that we don’t choose to act on our knowledge” (RM 97). Virtue “is more a matter of abiding by one’s knowledge or remaining constant to it, instead of letting it be forever displaced by numberless counter-opinions and judgments that are determined by our passions and whims of the moment” (RM 102). The fact that we may not do this, that we may indeed choose inconsistently, drifting from one opinion to another, one impulse to another, one course of action to another, indicates the human capacity for freedom of judgment. “It is not because of ignorance that we fail, ultiomately, it is because we don’t choose when we could choose” (RM 108).

As for the force of circumstances, “for most of us, most of the time, our adversities and ill fortune are not such as to leave us completely without resources” (RM 115). Rather, “the important thing is how we take our good fortune, or our ill fortune. That is what determines whether we are well off or not, not the good or ill fortune itself” (RM 116). Circumstances seldom allow us to choose the best; they often prevent us from choosing what is especially good, but they always allow us to choose the better or the worse, until incapacity or death wrest choice from us.

Behind the flaccid relativism of thinkers like Russell and Barrett stands Nietzsche, mocking the Last Man whom they comfort with their egalitarian niaiseries and proclaiming grandly, “God is dead”—”God” meaning not only the God of the Bible, and the gods of all books deemed holy, but any “objectively grounded moral order anywhere in the universe” (RM 129). “The purpose of [Rational Man] is to suggest that in Nietzsche’s terms, God is not dead after all, that nature itself, or at least human nature, does involve a moral order, which it should be the concern of human beings to recognize and act upon” (RM 129). Less stirring thinkers than Nietzsche have also supposed that nature offers no real moral support to human beings. Utilitarians, for example, make reason instrumental to the desires. Utilitarians commit what might call the fallacy of misplaced sociality. Their concern for the greatest ‘good’ for the greatest number—good being defined as pleasure—rests on the assumption that “morals or ethics involves only their relations with others and never their relations with themselves” (RM 130). They typically ignore the question of whether pleasure is good for oneself or, if so, what pleasures are good. Further, they “have always had some difficulty in showing why anyone has any obligation to think about others” if hedonism should rule us all. John Stuart Mill argues that we take pleasure in altruism, an argument Veatch finds “dubious, to say the least” (RM 132). It might be more accurate and kinder to say that it is idiosyncratic; what Veatch has in mind, however, is that pleasure is no guarantee of self-knowledge, that one might, on hedonic grounds, take oneself to be happy if permanently deluded with drugs or some other illusion-producing device.

Mill also argues, it should be noted, that some pleasures are better than others, that it is better to be Socrates satisfied than a pig satisfied—assuming of course that one is a man, not a pig. But it also should be noted that in this claim he begins to move a bit closer to Aristotle, and away from Jeremy Bentham. The twentieth-century philosopher and contemporary of Russell G. E. Moore condemns Aristotle for committing what he calls the “naturalistic fallacy.”

Moore wonders why “a natural tendency” should “necessarily be a tendency toward the good” (RM 137). As Paul the Apostle observed long before him, Moore that some men aim at evil, adding that some aim at things morally indifferent. He concurs with Hume: One cannot logically derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ “Aristotle’s definition of the good is held to be mistaken, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it violates the logical canons of good definition: it attempts to define something not in terms of what it is”—a thing—”but in terms of what it is not”—a value (RM 139). That is, to define a fact as a value is to fail to define it at all, to fail to construct a proper definition in the first place. Veatch rejoins that this refutation ranges too widely. “On the same principles just about any definition of anything must also commit a fallacy,” since if you define A as A you’ve produced a tautology, but if you define A as B or C then you’re defining it “in terms of what is other than A, and this violates the principle that everything is what it is and not another thing” (RM 140). “This is far more than Moore himself ever bargained for” (RM 140), limiting the definition of ‘fish,’ for example, to ‘fish.’ If Moore means simply that it is contradictory to say ‘A is not-A,’ or ‘a fish is a not-fish,’ then the question remains, is a so-called ‘value’ a not-is?

The fact/value distinction, progeny of Hume’s is/ought distinction, depends upon “an excessively static and atomistic conception of facts” (RM 145). But is there (in fact, one is tempted to say) “any fact at all that does not suggest all sorts of possibilities of how it might become other and different?” (RM 145). On the contrary, “the whole of reality is shot through with the distinction between potentiality and actuality, between what is still only able to be and what actually is,” between the imperfect and the perfect, the incomplete and the complete, the empty to the full” (RM 145). When Aristotle says ‘the good’ he means “the actual as related to the potential” (RM 145). A mangled hand cannot fully serve the purpose of a hand; a mangled soul cannot fully serve the purpose of a soul. The fact that mangled souls aim at evil or at least defective ends illustrates the point. It is only if he remain within the limits of quantitative logic and/or nonteleological modern science that we must deny that this is so. But the denial may be the product of the limitations of our way of thinking, which restricts rational thought too much.

The existentialism of William Barrett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other Nietzsche epigoni attacks not only Aristotelian ethics but any rationalist ethics. According to existentialists, “reason cannot tell man anything about how to live or what to live for” not because reason cannot be used for such a purpose but because there is no “ethical truth” to be discovered in the first place (RM 150). Faced with a universe devoid of meaning, human beings can only give meaning to their otherwise meaningless lives by freely choosing the way of life they happen to prefer. This argument replicates the is/ought distinction in its own way, holding up “disinterested, impersonal objectivity on the one hand and a committed subjectivity on the other” (RM 155). Veatch rejoins, choice alone can’t make the choice right. “The issue is whether one can ever choose rightly without knowledge” (RM 155). To deploy the term ‘commitment,’ as such thinkers do, sounds impressive, but why should Sartre prefer his commitment to communism over Hitler’s commitment to fascism? Merely because it is his commitment? This would elevate love of one’s own to unsuspected moral heights. Is ‘my own’ worth of a human being, given the nature of human beings? Is it worthy of my own potential? How, on the basis of existentialism, can I know?

Sartre satirizes what Aristotle esteems as the spoudaios, the serious man. Such a man “tries to hide from himself that it is human freedom which decides on moral values,” that “if man is not the creator of being, he is at least the inventor of moral values”; such a man “takes refuge in the spirit of seriousness” in an attempt “to evade moral responsibility” (RM 155), which requires us not to follow our true nature or to obey divine law but to invent values ‘against’ an indifferent, amoral nature and to admit that divine law is human, all-too-human. But if there is no God—in the broad sense of no personal god or gods and no nature with moral content—then to act as if there were is nothing more than what Sartre calls “bad faith.” Veatch rejoins, to claim that God is dead is to claim “a certain understanding, a knowledge of what the score is” (RM 157). This must be “a morally relevant knowledge, a knowledge that indicates what we should do and what our responsibilities are in light of the facts” (RM 157). “Must not the very dialectic of their own position catch the existentialists up into the logic of ‘Know thyself’ and of the examined life, and ultimately into the ethics of rational man?” (RM 157) And to do that is at least tacitly to acknowledge one’s humanness, one’s givenness, one’s nature, to try to understand what it is, rather than escaping into imagining oneself as a Nietzschean superman, beyond good and evil, or into imagining a socialist utopia as a real future regime.

“While in their capacity as scientists,” Veatch concludes, “men can attain a knowledge of nature that is literally limitless in its own dimension, yet in respects to other dimensions such a scientific knowledge of nature is both narrowly defined and rigorously restricted, not merely in fact, but in principle” (RM 158). Much the same is true for quantitative logic. Meanwhile, however, “men merely as human beings,” not as scientists or mathematicians, “can, by exercising their intelligence, achieve a kind of commonsense understanding of their own nature and of the nature of the world they live in which is different from scientific knowledge, and for which scientific knowledge is no substitute” (RM 158).